


the time difference

by Zara Hemla (zarahemla)



Category: Friday Night Lights
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 14:21:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarahemla/pseuds/Zara%20Hemla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you live with all your faults.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the time difference

**Author's Note:**

> This here is for [](http://community.livejournal.com/nothing_hip/profile)[**nothing_hip**](http://community.livejournal.com/nothing_hip/), prompt is from the Goo Goo Dolls song, "Slide." Which, for the record, I loathe, and have loathed, ever since 1998. Thank you, John Rzeznick, for creating such a black hole of stupidity.

**the time difference**

 

At five a.m. three days after his football team takes the state championship, Matt Saracen gropes clumsily for the ringing phone. He knows who it is; it's the only person who always, _always_, gets the time difference wrong between Texas and Iraq.

"H'lo! Hello!" he says into the phone as loudly as he can without waking his Grandma (who should be used to weird early morning calls but somehow isn't, and has a tendency to get confused and sometimes cry, so Matt tries to answer the phone on the second ring and be as coherent as he can, be a man about the whole thing). "Dad! Hello!"

A pause, then, "Hi, son. Probably woke you up again. Sorry about that." Because his dad is calling on satellite phone, it always takes a minute to get an answer from him (and often times, after Matt speaks, he hears his own statement again like an echo). Matt isn't fanciful but half-asleep sometimes he imagines his words bouncing up into the sky, fully formed sentences, and then bouncing back down again into the desert, where it is hot, and daylight, and full of soldiers.

"Nah nah, it's okay. How - how are you, dad? Everything going good?"

"Sure, son, I'm doing great. We moved again, but keep your letters coming to the HQ and I'll get them, don't worry." His dad always says this. Matt never tells him that he has no idea where else to send letters -- the White House? The mythical HQ, which Matt imagines to be a big drab tent like in "Three Kings," is the only address he has ever had for his father's whereabouts.

"No problem, dad. Do you need anything else, anything like - like socks or something?" Sometimes his father requests strange items to be sent to him. A fine-toothed comb, deodorant, an SI swimsuit edition, once even a copy of the Koran. Matt faithfully ships them to HQ from Dillon's dinky post office.

"No, I'm good, we just got in some DVDs and a bunch of Doritos, so we're gonna party down tonight with the latest movies." His dad sounds, as always, pretty uninterested in partying down. The only thing he ever gets excited about is troop movements and President Bush's latest statements.

Matt is feeling pretty single-minded though, so he says instead of asking any more questions, "Did - did you happen to hear about our championship game?"

Pause. "I sure did, son, and I'm proud of you fellas for getting to Austin. I got to watch the game on ESPN, they set it up special. I would have called earlier but I wasn't sure when you all got back."

"We stayed an extra day, just to, you know, see the town a little bit." They had all gone to a bar and gotten stinking drunk and then staggered around Austin hollering their fight song, but Matt doesn't see any need to mention that.

"Did you see my play in the last few seconds? I thought of that play and Coach let me run it." Matt can't keep the pride out of his voice, but after the pause his father speaks in the same measured way as always.

"I sure did see that play and it was really nicely executed, Matthew, but if you hadn't let the score get so far down in the first half. A sack, Matt? And an interception too? I don't understand how someone who practices as much as you could let the score go down by twenty-six in the first half. It's sloppy, that's what it is."

Matt stares down at his blankets -- he can almost see the faded design on them, for the sun is beginning to come up. It's not like his father disapproves, no, not exactly that. It's more like he's just measuring you like a new recruit and telling you that, you know, you're not gonna cut it in the Army, so how about you go join the Air Force, that's where all the momma's boys go.

"But dad, didn't you see me in the second half," he says futilely, knowing that his father has stopped listening, was probably never listening in the first place, and had only called to deliver his lecture before going out to defuse a bomb or bomb a city or whatever it is that he does.

"Matt, if you make decisive moves in the beginning of the game, you won't have to scramble to catch up at the end. It's what soldiers do. You crush them from the start and then everyone knows who's the boss. Understand? Remember that for your next practice."

"Yes sir," says Matt numbly, and then his father asks about his grandma and tells him to do well in his studies and finish out the school year with good grades. "Good grades will get you into OCS, son," he says, and he doesn't ask even one thing about Julie or how she's doing. And Matt doesn't offer any more news. Why would his dad care that Coach Taylor is going to TMU and next year Matt will be back on the bench? Why would his dad care that it's 50/50 Julie's mom will change her mind and take Julie to Austin? In Iraq it's wartime and the sun is beating down on his dad's dusty helmet and probably someone else wants to use the phone because his dad says goodbye really quickly and before Matt's "I love you dad" bounces up into the satellite, the connection is severed with a click.

Matt hangs up the phone, knowing he can't sleep now. He pulls on a t-shirt and some sweatpants. It won't wake his grandma if he grabs a bagel and goes out to throw the ball around a bit. He can practice some of the shuffles that Street taught him. In a few months it won't matter, all the hours, all the fancy footwork, but he doesn't want to let Street down. Street had grinned at him after the game, and told him he was awesome, numero uno, the Man, the Man. In that heady, lovely moment, Matt had believed it, but of course now he is back in reality; now he knows better.

\--end--

*OCS = officer candidates school


End file.
